This book review is probably the toughest one I’ve ever done. Since its publication last July, Go Set a Watchman has been the center of literary controversy. It is the second novel by Harper Lee (author of the 1960 acclaimed work on race relations, To Kill a Mockingbird). Honestly, I felt that I had to read Watchman myself to form my own opinions. Several years earlier a friend made an April Fool’s Day joke that Harper Lee was publishing a follow-up to To Kill a Mockingbird. Little did we know that he was right. The story of the story itself could fill up volumes. At first glance, Watchman may seem like a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. But Lee wrote Watchman as her first draft in 1957 to her acclaimed novel. The editor rejected her first effort. After several drafts, Lee finalized the story and renamed it To Kill a Mockingbird. There has been heated discussion about how and why Go Set a Watchman was finally released over 50 years after her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was published. Reading Watchman can be very uncomfortable. Set in the 1950s, 20 years after the events of To Kill a Mockingbird, a grown up Jean Louise Finch returns to Maycomb, Alabama for a visit from New York City. Jean Louise, of course, is the daughter of Atticus Finch, the famed lawyer who defended an African American man accused of rape during the Great Depression. However, Atticus in Go Set a Watchman is almost from a mirror universe. He is opposed to integrating African Americans in Southern society, reads a venomous pamphlet titled The Black Plague detailing the horrors of a post-Jim Crow society, and rails against the NAACP. Worse, Jean Louise’s childhood friend Henry (who wants to marry her) is a lawyer for Atticus who unabashedly shares his views on race. These revelations make Jean Louise sick and disillusioned, which had the same effect on me. Atticus Finch has fallen off his pedestal. I believe that Go Set a Watchman should not be compared with To Kill a Mockingbird because the tone of each novel is markedly different. As a friend told me, perhaps Harper Lee was trying to tell two stories of racial injustice in America but decided to go with To Kill a Mockingbird because it is more uplifting. Part of me feels that Go Set a Watchman should never have been published because it ruins the image of her first and previously only work. Nevertheless, Go Set a Watchman shows continued racial conflict in the American South, which was recently exposed again with the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina and the removal of the Confederate flag (a symbol of racism) in the state’s capital earlier in 2015. TS
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CategoriesAuthorTom Schmidt lives in Prescott Valley, AZ. Archives
October 2018
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October 2018
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